The Psychology of the Anti-Trumpian: Part 2

The Ill…..

A mushy desire for revenge for some bad luck that has spoilt their lives, the absence of any instinct of honour and duty, and an unlimited thirst for money without work and for rights without responsibilities bring them together… Here the word ‘Liberty’ takes on the bloody significance that it has in the declining ages. What is meant is: liberation from all the bonds of civilization, from every kind of form and custom, from all the people whose mode of life they feel in their dull fury to be superior… For, once more be it said, the opposite of noble is not poor, but vulgar.

— Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision

The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals

King Lyngvi and his brothers now gathered an army and went against King Sigmund, because, although they had always received the short end in their previous dealings, this new development was one too many. Now they intended to destroy the pride of the Volsungs.

— The Saga of the Volsungs

The anti-Trumpian cult which I outlined in Part 1 of this essay is but a more frenzied and (amazingly) even less historically informed iteration of the Marxist social progress/classless society ‘vanguard’ which has peddled perhaps the most successful drug in history: the ‘hopium’ of an ‘equal’ utopia. Someday — as the cult is decidedly a secular religion, a secular messianism with the primary god of the indeterminate future — some version of the cult shall, so its theology promises, ‘liberate’ ‘the people’ from the evil triumvirate of capitalism, patriarchy, and aristocratic excellence (and excellence, generally). The non-privileged, ‘historically victimized’ ‘resistance’ shall, on that day of days, ‘save democracy’ — actually Spengler’s ‘Liberty’ — and usher in a golden age, akin perhaps to that which is depicted in Star Trek episodes which suitably advertise pluralism and the triumph of socialism. Then, enlightened individuals everywhere will nod in vigorous approval at the multiplicity of racial type exemplars arrayed in their asexual garb and in their noble scientific and ‘humanitarian’ endeavors — just as in one’s favorite progressive-programming drama or sitcom. Personal identification with the ritual of hating ‘Donald J. Trump,’ like the decades-ago-accomplished Marxist personal identification with hating ‘capitalism,’ will be irrevocable. ‘Honest debate’ over the veracity, or non-plausibility, of the anti-Trump cult theology, as well as its goals, will be heresy, or at least ‘foolish’ — for one cannot argue with revealed truths. Deep cultists, at an unconscious animal level, will refuse the possibility that the gods of ‘diversity and inclusion’ may be false. And rationality, that old myth of ‘dead white men,’ will naturally be disallowed from dirtying the newly minted, and hallowed, virtues. State-approved emotional outbursts, pretenses of victimhood, and the bullying of heretics will be considered holy acts toward the unholy relics of ‘whiteness.’ And, the ‘right side of history’ will finally be actualized so that all persons of correct ‘thinking’ will have (will want to have) the same level of uninformed righteousness on such great matters as ‘the Environment.’

Every religion, you know — every ‘cult-ure’ — has its style, its idiosyncratic understanding of ‘philosophical basics,’ such as truth, morality, and beauty — harmony, in general. The anti-Trumpian cult ‘styles’ itself by worshipping a quite small set of immutable human physical traits and an indefinitely large abstraction, the latter of which masquerades as a physical reality. In the first case, the gods are: skin tone, ‘race’ (a watered-down definition), and gender. In the second case, the god is ‘the Environment.’ Metaphysically, the anti-Trumpian cult has what philosophers would call a ‘small ontology’ — that is, it doesn’t recognize the existence of very many realities: it’s very simple and ‘reductionist’ about what the elements are that comprise the human universe. Addressing why this is so is another aspect of the ‘psychology of the anti-Trumpian’ which must wait till a later writing for examination. To ‘correctly’ relate to (I shan’t say ‘think about’) the mentioned gods, however, is, from the cult’s perspective, to be moral, to have the right aesthetic, and to embrace an acceptable ‘personal truth.’ Religious awareness of the four mentioned gods — skin tone, ‘race,’ gender, and ‘the Environment’ — upon which each anti-Trumpian focuses his worship, as well as, in many individual cases, unconsciously projects his notion of the proper balm for all discontents in life, is, I contend, a psychological defense mechanism. I mentioned this briefly in Part 1 of this essay. This religious awareness and projection is the anti-Trumpian’s habitual — that is, unconscious — behavior for both discerning meaning and putting at a distance all things which threaten the discernment of meaning. This mostly unconscious entrainment of focus, to the point of adoration of certain beliefs and behaviors, is, however, a gambit. It is a gambit which has been played by other players. Those individuals who have actually lost themselves in the gambit, as is evident in conversations with anti-Trumpians, only first lose their capacity for reason. Next, they lose their very selves by means of a peculiar postmodern form of bewitchment: that is, they are entrained to a hyper focus on other gods: ‘individualism,’ sexual ‘liberation,’ and ‘my truth’ — as well as the four ‘gods’ already mentioned (skin tone, ‘race,’ gender, and ‘the Environment’). The term ‘bewitchment’ here, it is important to note, is not used hyperbolically — think not that witchcraft is a story only for children or ‘primitives.’ For, to bewitch, as either a cultivated ability or a natural gift, is to exercise an unconscious influence or control over a person or group by cultivating that person’s or group’s interest in a certain idea or personality to an inordinate, unnatural, degree. In the case of the anti-Trumpian cultist, the ideas employed to this effect are the above-listed ‘gods.’

Although this essay is to do with a recently created religious cult, its title indicates that what we are examining, more generally, are the psychological traits of individuals indoctrinated into the cult. The ‘gods’ which I have listed are, perhaps, therefore, more usefully thought of in psychological terms: specifically, as forms of what I shall call emancipation addiction, especially radical ‘individualism,’ sexual ‘liberation,’ and the need to call one’s opinions ‘my truth.’ All of these ‘new gods’ indicate an inculcated desire to strive for a form of ‘freedom’ that is sold, by not clearly identifiable sources, as optimum, but are actually desires and states of being that are degrading of those objective standards — such as the virtues of traditional societies — which allow for both spiritual fulfillment and mental health. On the level of social interaction, the mentioned forms of addiction eventually lead to the same end: a ‘democracy’ of nothingness. For one cannot, in fact, say that decisions are democratically made when they are but the logical consequence of manipulated emotions — that is, not decisions at all. And addictions do, in fact, alter the emotional traits and balance of those who are thus addicted. The ‘democracy,’ therefore, which one hears constantly promoted by mass media Globalist evangelists consists of a faux ‘republic’ of non-persons. Consider: if a soldier ‘chooses’ to fall in line after years of drilling, how much ‘choice’ is involved in this ‘decision’? Or, if a martial artist ‘chooses’ to employ a particular defense against an attack on his person by someone wielding a knife, how much ‘choice’ does he exercise? This is the level of the anti-Trumpian’s ‘choice’ to hate and demonize ‘Donald J. Trump.’ True, it is sad to discover that so many individuals have been ‘zombified,’ and made to focus their lives on an ideology’s strategic social construct, but that discovery is at least the beginning of the end of the manipulative process.

More important, I would suggest, than the general realization that there is a mass conditioning process occurring, and that it is cultic in nature, is the eventual, more specific, question which arises in those who have recovered from zombification, or not been zombified in the first place: that is, how many signs does an intelligent person — a being which resists animal behavior modification — require in order to recognize the mass suicide that is ongoing in multiple ways and stages by means of the referred-to conditioning process — first, as the murder of reason, then as the murder of personality, and, finally, as the murder of humans en masse? The mass murder of in utero human beings has already been accomplished, and repeatedly rationalized, in the United States and elsewhere for several decades, and is seriously discussed by millions of indoctrinated persons in the same context as ‘freedom.’ But, if a population can be made to rationalize such horror, it is certainly impossible to argue that it has any real moral boundaries at all. Such a society, in other words, has become cynical without realizing it. As Alfred Rosenberg reflected in The Myth of the Twentieth Century in the 1930s,

The abortion movement can be described as an act of despair in the face of present-day social conditions. It is one thing to promote the decline of the people, and yet another to attack it with passionate will. A state power that sets as its goal the elimination of its children corrupts us all.¹

There is no moral high ground for a state that stands defensively on the ‘principle’ of giving its citizens the ‘right’ to mass murder its future. The fact that some will read Rosenberg’s words and, based upon their innate selfishness and animal training by the TV, be shocked — and bring to mind such phrases as “you dared to quote a high-ranking Nazi” — only reveals the degree to which dogma has already won in its long competition with logic and the truth of propositions. Such mass-conditioned shock, importantly, is founded upon a religious mindset, upon unconscious psychological conditioning. As the philosopher of science Karl Popper stated, however, “The true Enlightenment thinker … never wants to talk anyone into anything… He seeks not to convince but to arouse — to challenge others to form free opinions.”² The present, widespread, fear of simply thinking about, or quoting, the statements of one’s supposed ‘enemies’ in a positive light — which is often now considered to be an expression of ‘hate’ — is an indicator of a subhuman mind. As the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle³ stated in his Nicomachean Ethics, “[I]t is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits.”⁴ Religious ‘reasoning,’ however, preys upon the minds of individuals that cannot, or wish not to, perceive the differences in certainty between politico-religious opinions and matters of logical necessity or empirical probability.

To a high degree, temporary though it may be, the mental defense mechanism of deifying a shallow idea of ‘race,’ or a fictional idea of gender, or a ‘liberating’ idea of sexual relations, or an obfuscating idea of ‘the Environment,’ compensates in anti-Trumpian cultists for their mostly dreary and cowardly worldview. Again, I speak here of the anti-Trumpian type — not all individuals of this type will possess exactly the same opinions. It is, however, I believe, characteristic of this type to exist as a derivative of other closely related personality types of the last two centuries who have also imbibed, sometimes wholly unconsciously, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ quintessentially sick philosophies: existentialism, Freudianism, logical positivism, and the Marxist disease’s ‘variants’ which obsess over ‘power relations.’ In Part 1 of this essay, I began with a quotation from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil: “Moral judgments and condemnations constitute the favorite revenge of the spiritually limited against those less limited.”⁵ We may, equivalently, however, express Nietzsche’s idea in the following terms: Spiritually compromised personality types are drawn to depressive philosophies because they yearn to find meaning there for their various lacks; if that proves impossible (and as Nietzsche notes), however, they need to find a way to lessen — to bring to their level — all recognized life-affirming philosophies, whether by the means of: mood analysis (existentialism), sexual analysis (Freudianism), or linguistic analysis (logical positivism). After such individuals (their ‘types’) have, thereby, laid the foundation for their own further spiritual weakening, they become even more easily drawn to similarly shallow dogmas in their attempts to self-heal the results of their superficial lifestyles and flippancy. My remarking on this pattern of behavior of, let us call them, miserable human ‘types’ amounts to an observation of animal behavior — to observing creatures that once were human. For, one can see undisguised in such beings — who, I believe, overwhelmingly populate the masses of anti-Trumpians — the fervor, the irrational anger, and the need to lie — the drive to dissemblance — about ‘heretics.’ Going back to Nietzsche, they must, for their own sanity — in the personality which they have constructed — take revenge against those whom they know are better. As I related at the end of Part 1 of this essay, this falseness of self will, eventually, bring about dire psychological, if not physical, consequences. For, does not the vulture circle that which it desires to be dead? But if it is wrong, and it circles too long, it starves.

What I call the ‘anti-Trumpian cult’ is not merely an expression which snobbishly provides an ‘intellectualist twist’ on the well-known ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome.’ Rest assured that no one hates unnecessary jargon more than I. This is not to say, however, that there is no connection between the two realities that these terms refer to. It is vital to note, though, that when I write of ‘psychology’ in this essay, in all of its parts, I refer not simply to the study of the physical brain or ‘behavior’ — which is today the more fashionable approach — but to the study of what the ancient Greeks called the psuche or psyche — the complete soul. On this distinction, Aristotle states in De Anima (‘On the Soul’), for example: “Now given that there are bodies of such and such a kind, viz., having life, the soul cannot be a body; for the body is the subject or matter, not what is attributed to it.”⁶ (And, of course, the brain is a part of the body.) A bit later in the text he adds, both more completely and more ambiguously:

From this it is clear that the soul is inseparable from its body, or at any rate that certain parts of it are (if it has parts) — for the actuality of some of them is the actuality of the parts themselves. Yet some may be separable because they are not the actualities of any body at all.⁷

And even later:

We [specifically] have no evidence as yet about thought or the power of reflexion; it seems to be a different kind of soul, differing as what is eternal from what is perishable; it alone is capable of being separated. All the other parts of soul, it is evident from what we have said, are, in spite of certain statements to the contrary, incapable of separate existence though, of course, distinguishable by definition.⁸

But ‘thought’ or ‘the power of reflexion,’ for Aristotle, is possessed, in the physical world, only by humans. Animals can imagine and remember, but only humans can think. But what if that ‘power of soul’ — thinking, specifically — were infiltrated and undermined in some humans by some, so to speak, ‘alien’ force? What, then, would be the nature of the creature which is left over after this process of infiltration?

The psyche (the ‘animating force’ — in Latin, anima) of the anti-Trumpian — and not he who simply votes for, or prefers the beliefs of, another candidate, but ritually hates ‘Donald J. Trump’ — I contend, is that of a human type which is in the ‘grip’ of an alien ‘animating force’ (psyche/anima) — one which has overtaken the anti-Trumpian’s own animating force. This alien-to-human-dignity force, by various means of subliminal and emotion-based manipulation, I suggest, inculcates — as said earlier — a ritual hatred of a particular persona, but one which, as also mentioned previously, is only currently directed toward the socially constructed idea, ‘Donald J. Trump.’ Most generally, however, and as Aristotle notes in De Anima, “what has soul in it differs from what has not in that the former displays life.”⁹ But what kind of life does the anti-Trumpian cultist lead? In ‘On the Soul,’ Aristotle describes three kinds of souls/psyches: vegetable, animal, and human, which entail three kinds of life. Aristotle argues that these three kinds differ in terms of their level of complexity, which is a function of the number of capacities, or ‘powers,’ that each kind of soul/psyche possesses. The vegetable soul, unsurprisingly, is the simplest of the three, for it contains the fewest capacities/‘powers’ — it lacks, for example, both organ perception¹⁰ as well as thought. The animal soul, a more complex set of capacities/‘powers,’ includes the vegetable soul’s capacities/‘powers,’ but possesses more in addition — it possesses organ perception, or, what Aristotle calls, the ‘sensory power.’¹¹ Thus, many animals can, for example, see, hear, and smell. Like the vegetable soul, however, the animal soul also lacks the capacity for thought, and because of this lack it is susceptible to methods of control and exploitation which those beings possessing actualized human souls are not susceptible to. The human soul, the most complex kind of soul on Earth, for Aristotle, includes all of the capacities of both the vegetable and the animal souls, but possesses more in addition.¹² It uniquely possesses, potentially, the power of thought — the capacity to reflect on, and to creatively apply, universal ideas to/in its existence. As Aristotle notes,

Again, among living things … certain living beings — a small minority — possess calculation and thought, for (among mortal beings) those which possess calculation have all the other powers mentioned, while the converse does not hold — indeed some live by imagination alone, while others have not even imagination.¹³

If, however, an intelligent force, person, or collective could find a way to, in Aristotelian language, ‘prevent actualization’ of the particularly human set of capacities of soul — the power of thought, specifically — that is, the complete human potential — of the human soul/psyche, then there would be no humans left, only human–looking animals.

The ‘less actualized’ human soul — that type of human soul which has not found its way to guiding its own life by means of its own thinking — can be, and has been, historically, a very malleable substance. The mass manipulation of societies throughout history — a manipulation based always upon something other than individuals’ free thought — it should always be remembered, has been the rule, not the exception. The widespread employment of propaganda, whether of a secular or religious bent, has been with humans since the earliest advanced civilizations.¹⁴ And deception has always accompanied its dissemination. Political and religious powers employing the right methods, clearly, can control the perceptions of human populations, to varying degrees of success. What they cannot do is control human thought — that is, what makes humans human — because such control is antithetical to the nature of what thought is: the capacity for conscious study and self-reflective self-correction. Perception, in other words, is not thought. What this means, however, is that the powers of religious and political propaganda are geared not toward humans but, rather, toward animals — human-looking animals, specifically. In De Anima, Aristotle states, “That perceiving and understanding are not identical is … obvious; for the former is universal in the animal world, the latter is found in only a small division of it. Further, thinking is also distinct from perceiving.”¹⁵ What Aristotle is saying here, essentially, is that, whereas all animals can perceive¹⁶, only very few can understand, and none can think. Only humans can think.

Animals, lacking thought, make much more passive beasts of burden than those humans which have actualized their unique nature by means of freely contemplating, and not merely practically implementing, ideas. Thought is, in fact, the greatest surety against all forms of enslavement, whether physical, mental, or spiritual. Thought — which includes the capacity to doubt (as Descartes so wonderfully discusses in Meditations) and to refute — is, however, an obstacle to big, ambitious projects. And this means that thought is an obstacle to the ambitions of some humans who don’t respect the capacity for thought in other humans. Again, it is not a question of whether there are forces wishing to reduce humans to something less than they can be, to animals — see the history of the twentieth century — but how these forces shall next carry out the process of reduction. Perhaps — like Dr. Eldon Tyrell does in the sci-fi film Blade Runner when he states, “More human than human is our motto” — these forces will pronounce to the public something magnanimous and ‘progressive,’ but mean the opposite of what they want you to think they mean. Such essentially anti-human forces would, and have, in other words, say/said one thing and do/did the opposite. The drugged state of being that is the consequence of over one hundred and fifty years of mystification by means of the Hegelian-Marxist metaphysic, and which has as one of its primary dogma a belief in an ‘end of history,’ hasn’t changed this desire, this ancient pattern of human behavior — it is merely an ‘upgrade.’ As Aristotle states in De Anima with respect to the nature of thinking, the nature of true mind, “the co-presence of what is alien to its nature is a hindrance and a block… Thus that in the soul which is called thought (by thought I mean that whereby the soul thinks and judges) is, before it thinks, not actually any real thing.”¹⁷ In other words: potential humans may be derailed from becoming actual humans by various means — both natural and artificial. Religious cults, such as the present-day anti-Trumpian cult, are examples of the latter.

For those who have not been bewitched — ‘deranged’ — by the various enticements and myth of postmodernity, what I have just stated is not a strange idea. Neither, more specifically, are the ideas of soul, mind, and thought and their interrelations proposed by Aristotle (and others) — which formed the basis of Western education for over a millennium. For, one of the conclusions of this line of thinking, taken up in the medieval period especially, is only the very ancient idea that there exists in the universe a positive and essentially manipulative force of evil which desires that, or moves toward the goal of, natural beings become/becoming unnatural. Bad things, that is, don’t simply ‘happen’: they are planned. But now, the reader may say, our author has certainly gone far afield! For, are we not speaking of political movements and human psychology and, only possibly, religious ‘cults’ — not the philosophy of history and the overall meaning of existence? But, how now? How do political movements arise? How do cults arise? How do religions arise? And how are they all related to one another? For, there are no firm boundaries here. Just as one culture ‘grows’ from an older culture, a ‘new’ cult grows from an older one as well. Cultures, one can say, ‘percolate up’ from beliefs which have themselves ‘percolated up’ from previous belief systems — sometimes ‘naturally,’ sometimes artificially. If one thinks carefully on what is called ‘Modernity,’ which is often interpreted as a product of something called ‘progress,’ it itself is a ‘cult-ure’ which originated in a particular disposition (in a great number of individuals at a particular time in history) which manifested as the desire to ‘overcome’: royalty, aristocracy, the religious state, and what was felt, by some, to be ‘useless metaphysical speculations.’ Look deeper, though … and one sees not only discontent with such things but hatred of the ethos that underlies them. Look deeper, though … and one notices a process, a long process — beginning, at the latest, with the so-called French ‘Revolution’ — of ‘subverting’ all previously dearly held beliefs and replacing them, slowly, but then sometimes dramatically, with ‘new’ virtues — ‘virtues’ which are more useful to maintaining the new, usurping power structures and to furthering new kinds of projects which are based, fundamentally, upon different ideas of human nature and existence itself. In Europe, France specifically, the virtues of the ‘Old Regime’ are replaced. In the world, the Traditional virtues of all Traditional societies — such as those of China and India and Russia — are replaced. As Oswald Spengler writes in The Hour of Decision, on the so-called ‘liberties’ introduced by the subverters going back to the French Revolution:

This is why these liberties, of which universal suffrage is one, are checked, suppressed, and completely inverted, once they have done their work and given the power into the hands of their exploiters. It was so in Jacobin France in 1793, in Bolshevist Russia, and in Germany’s trade-union Republic of 1918… Liberty [today’s ‘democracy’] has always been the liberty of those who wish to obtain the power, not to abolish it. This active Liberalism progresses from Jacobinism to Bolshevism logically.¹⁸

Cannot everyone see the same ploy today in the anti-Trumpian ‘democracy’ which is so often pronounced from the high pulpit of a sanctimonious secular religion? Cannot everyone see that, to a certain kind of mind which refuses to recognize the potential of the human soul in human-looking bodies, not only is it easier to destroy human lives than to create them, but better?

************

The Healthy…..

Royal son of Laertes, Odysseus, great tactician … I must tell you how I feel and how all this will end — so you won’t crowd around me, one after another, coaxing like a murmuring clutch of doves. I hate that man like the very Gates of Death who says one thing but hides another in his heart.

— Achilles, Homer’s The Iliad

Thus Beowulf bore himself with valor… He had been poorly regarded for a long time, was taken by the Geats for less than he was worth: and their lord too had never much esteemed him in the mead-hall. They firmly believed that he lacked force, that the prince was a weakling; but presently every affront to his deserving was reversed.

— Beowulf

I will proclaim to the world the deeds of Gilgamesh … the king who knew the countries of the world. He was wise, he saw mysteries and knew secret things, he brought us a tale of the days before the flood. He went on a long journey, was weary, worn-out with labour, returning he rested, he engraved on a stone the whole story.

— The Epic of Gilgamesh

Here am I with Sinfjotli, my sister’s son, and we now want for you to know that not all the Volsungs are dead.

— Sigmund, The Saga of the Volsungs

It is evident that there are different human ‘types’ for different kinds of cultures and civilizations. ‘Modernity,’ like all other cultural/civilizational paradigms, has its highest types — the ‘Modern Woman’ or the ‘Businessman,’ for example — the ‘Revolutionary’ and ‘the Dissident.’ But so too does the ‘Old Regime’ of Europe, or, more generally speaking, Tradition. The ‘Sage’ and the ‘Hero’ are quintessentially Traditional ‘highest types.’ These latter types, unlike the types of Modernity, don’t relegate themselves to some ‘area’ of study or some socially acceptable ‘role’ or ‘profession,’ though they may pursue a craft for a lifetime. A particular kind of society, like a particular type of culture or civilization, is founded upon a particular type, which the members of that society embrace both consciously and unconsciously — probably more so the latter. If a visible anti-type moves in, or suddenly erupts, into a society, conscious and unconscious turmoil will erupt as well. When this happens, many persons of the prevalent type won’t understand why they are upset, let alone try, by means of reason, to discern the source of their upset. They will simply, intuitively, know that something of a different nature to that which they are accustomed has intruded upon their ‘system.’ They will see an outline of the truth of this ‘other’ — perhaps a human-shaped outline — and will ‘rest,’ as much as this is now possible, on their felt certainty in the explanatory power of that vague image. Not all members of such a society, mind, will feel this, because not all of these members in, say, the Modern paradigm, have assimilated fully the values of Modernity. And, then, there are the different methods of ‘type formation’ which are characteristic, as well, of different societies, which even the ‘common man’ will have an unconscious awareness of.

“But,” some will say, to my proposed list of ‘typical types,’ “We moderns do (for example) have heroes today — it is not {indignation} a ‘type’ of the past! It is not a quintessentially ‘Traditional’ type!” “A firefighter (for example) runs into a burning building to save children, does he not?! A soldier in a covert war for resources gives his life, does he not?! A would-be mother endures thirty hours of labor! A teenager stands outside of the White House with a premade sign to ‘protest corruption’! A ‘powerful woman’ makes a clever, and unusually informed, public remark to a male CEO at a board meeting!” Yes, some of these, I do concede, are brave things. But they are not, in the Traditional — the true — sense of the word, ‘heroic.’ For, the Traditional hero is essentially abhorrent to the Modernist type, to the Modernist ‘project’ in general, and, thus, to the source of these things: modern sensibilities — and cannot be allowed to conjure up, in the public mind, any ancient or medieval notions of personhood. For, that is what the true concept of the hero instantiated does. And that is a danger to the modern project. There can be brave people, but there cannot be heroes. But, nevertheless, the ancient archetype of the hero is manifesting now, in epic fashion, in one of the most ignorantly vilified and slandered individuals in human history: one Donald J. Trump. Yes, prepare yourselves: cynics, atheists, all of the disenchanted of the world: Donald J. Trump, in the ancient sense of the word, is a hero. And he is manifesting this ancient, and hoped-to-be-forgotten, by some, archetype of pre-modernity 24/7 by means of expressing, by his very being, the classical hero’s traits. Therefore, for all of those individuals and institutions which have embraced the artificially imposed values of a ‘post-heroic’ age, Trump’s very presence on the world stage denotes a psychological reckoning of gigantic proportions, and a wrecking of the present world that is in process with respect to both modern concepts of history and the very tenability of the idea of ‘progress.’

Honestly ponder, dear reader, the traits of the ‘classic hero,’ as I shall provide them here quoted from Britannica, a sound and mainstream encyclopedia, ever keeping in mind Trump’s typical actions and behavior:

War or dangerous adventure is the hero’s normal occupation. He is … magnanimous to his followers and ruthless to his enemies… He is sometimes, like Odysseus [in the Hellenic ‘dark age’ epics Iliad and Odyssey], cunning and wise in counsel, but a hero is not usually given to much subtlety. He is a man of action rather than thought and lives by a personal code of honour that admits of no qualification. His responses are usually instinctive, predictable, and inevitable. He accepts challenge and sometimes even courts disaster. Thus baldly stated, the hero’s ethos seems oversimple by the standards of a later age. He is childlike in his boasting and rivalry, in his love of boasting and rivalry, in his love of presents and rewards, and in his concern for his reputation. He is sometimes foolhardy and wrong-headed, risking his life — and the lives of others — for trifles.¹⁹

In reading this passage, one must realize that the hero’s disposition is a manifestation of a very old, much more encompassing and less ‘specialized’ philosophy of life. Observe how Gilgamesh, for example, and Beowulf, in the eponymous poems about them, and Sigmund in The Saga of the Volsungs, and Achilles, in Homer’s Iliad, barreled through life — they didn’t observe the niceties. They weren’t politic. The true hero, like the Viking explorer, or the Spartan warrior, or even Conan the Barbarian in Robert Howard’s famous short stories, laughs at danger, and especially at puffed-up ‘wise men’ (today’s ‘experts’) or sorcerers (today’s ‘social scientists’ and ‘politicians’). He does not subscribe to their ‘magic,’ their religion, their manipulation. ‘Managers’ of all kinds have no power over the hero, for he is free in the real sense, not in the Modernist, state-sanctioned, ‘democratic’ sense. Low things are hateful to him — as when General George S. Patton stated that defeat is hateful to all true Americans — as are men who repeat dramatic stories with relish, yet live vicariously through better men and through the illusions of conniving systems — rather than for themselves. Consider, then, point by point, the above-provided quotation and how Donald J. Trump fully embodies nearly all of the qualities listed.

Point 1: “War or dangerous adventure is the hero’s normal occupation.” Now, Trump is no warrior or solider, in the physical sense, but who can deny Carl von Clausewitz’s very learned opinion in On War that “[w]e see, therefore, that war is not merely an act of policy but a true political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, carried on with other means”²⁰? When one considers the situation of great peril, both from assassins and millions of ignorant, kamikaze-like ‘haters,’ that Trump has willingly put himself into, ‘dangerous adventure’ clearly is his ‘normal occupation.’ Point 2: “He [the hero] is … magnanimous to his followers and ruthless to his enemies.” Who has not seen the love and constant from-the-heart charm that Trump exhibits at his rallies, and elsewhere? Alternatively, in his unremitting attacks and dressing down — for years — of all enemies, Trump has shown his ruthlessness towards the forces which constantly slander and provoke him. Point 3: “He is sometimes … cunning and wise in counsel, but … not usually given to much subtlety.” How often have Trump’s (now seen to be prophetic) predictions been borne out, and his political and financial acumen validated? Alternatively, how little does Trump try to be subtle, or politic, about — or to ‘sugarcoat’ — anything? Point 4: “He is a man of action rather than thought and lives by a personal code of honour that admits of no qualification.” Trump obviously, to any honest observer, constantly acts and is constantly on the move — no other politician’s lifestyle compares with the pace of his schedule. His is, clearly, a practical, active, wisdom, rather than a quiet, reflective, approach to existence. And, as pertains to a ‘personal code of honour,’ Trump always does what he thinks is right — his ‘advisors’ are there only to ‘shoot ideas’ — which Trump is known to regularly take or leave. Point 5: “His responses are usually instinctive, predictable, and inevitable.” Trump’s critics, as is well known, often harp on his repetitiveness and predictability with respect to his diction and his daily, trivial, interactions — as well as how he ‘goes with his gut,’ or ‘instinct,’ on matters of even the greatest importance. Point 6: “He accepts challenge and sometimes even courts disaster.” Trump never backs down and is ‘bull-headed’ — a ‘bull in a china shop’ — to the point even, many would argue, of recklessness. Point 7: “The hero’s ethos seems oversimple by the standards of a later age.” How often do Trump’s critics and ‘haters’ call him ‘regressive,’ ‘patriarchal,’ or ‘antiquated,’ as well as ‘simple’ in his locutions — which all point, from their perspective, to his unevolved ethics? Point 8: “He is childlike in his boasting and rivalry, in his love of boasting and rivalry, in his love of presents and rewards, and in his concern for his reputation.” Need anything be said about this? For, how many millions of statements have been made to the effect that Trump is ‘boastful’? And how evident is it that he loves to fight his rivals, and that he loves to be in the limelight (receiving ‘rewards’), and, finally, loves to promote his own reputation? Point 9: “He is sometimes foolhardy and wrongheaded, risking his life — and the lives of others — for trifles.” One could easily argue that Trump’s running for President a second and a third time has put him, as well as his entire family, in the crosshairs of thousands of very rich and powerful people around the world. Whether his reasons for doing so are ‘trifles’, however, is doubtful.

And now we know the nature of the classical hero — something which, I suggest, the anti-Trumpian cult and its minions hate in its essence, whether the ‘useful’ avatars of the cult realize this or not. Recall from Part 1 of this essay that the ‘ritual of hating’ the social construct ‘Donald J. Trump’ is a hatred not for a man — although this is the usual ‘messaging’ — but for a collection of traits: physical as well as character — that is, a particular man’s being the following: charming, successful, supremely confident, Caucasian, tall, blue-eyed, blond-haired — and never forget the strong element of ‘anti-racism’ in the anti-Trumpian cult! But now we see that there is even more to this equation. For, the archetype that Trump embodies is not merely the typical patriarchal ‘white man,’ who is also Nietzsche’s ‘blond beast’ in somewhat subdued form — that is, the man who has still, in the face of all modernizing techniques of taming directed towards what are considered to be antiquated or ‘toxic’ warrior/masculine types, preserved his strong, ancestral, and natural impulses.²¹ The archetype that Trump manifests most fully, and which both scares and deranges the typical anti-Trumpian cultist the most, whether they fully understand the source of their fears or not, is the very ancient one of the heroic Westerner, the type feared most by today’s anti-ethnic identity systematizers, as well as their allies: the transnational, in both meanings of the word, dissolvers of Tradition who wish to remake the world in their own image. Trump is their nemesis, and he symbolizes their nemesis. By his very being, on multiple levels, he conjures up ideas and deep feelings in the human mass which threaten to overwhelm and destroy the ‘new’ ideas and feelings pushed by the Globalist ‘drug dealers’ of the shiny drugs of ‘global citizenship’ and ‘inclusive pluralism’ — ideas and feelings which have no deep roots and no connections with the collective unconscious or the deeper needs and purposes of humankind in its various manifestations. These ‘dealers’ of un-sustaining, superficial, ideas and feelings are entities which, in their collectivizing madness, want an unholy, and ugly, blending of humanity into a malleable mass — to blend all genders, blend all races and colors, to blend all characters into one homogenous shitpile of low-I.Q. flesh sacks and useful ‘technicians.’ The prevalent psychological type of this humanity-erasing anti-soul, you see, had thought that it had done away long ago with the old ways and the old gods. But it was wrong. And to (attempt to) make up for its lately realized incorrectness, it has hastily resorted to the ruse of reanimating an ancient method of inducing collective ritual action as well as the ancient need for human sacrifice, of one form or another. Its first subject is, perhaps, the last of the world heroes: Donald J. Trump.*******

Footnotes

Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century (Clemens & Blair, 2021; translated from the fourth German edition, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, 1937), 305.
Karl Popper, “On Freedom,” in All Life is Problem Solving (1994), translated from the German by Patrick Camiller.
Lived 384-322 BC.
Nicomachean Ethics 1094b:24-25, translated by W. D. Ross; revised by J. O. Urmson. In The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, Volume Two, edited by Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press: 1984). My emphasis.
My emphasis
On the Soul 412a:17-20, translated by J. A. Smith. In The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, Volume One, edited by Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press: 1984).
On the Soul 413a:4-7, translated by J. A. Smith. In The Complete Works of Aristotle.
On the Soul 413b:25-29, translated by J. A. Smith. In The Complete Works of Aristotle. My emphasis.
On the Soul 413a:22-23, translated by J. A. Smith. In The Complete Works of Aristotle.
This statement should not be taken as being in contradiction with Aristotle’s statement that “[t]he parts of plants in spite of their extreme simplicity are organs; e.g. the leaf serves to shelter the pericarp, the pericarp to shelter the fruit,” etc. On the Soul 412a:28—412b:2, translated by J. A. Smith. In The Complete Works of Aristotle. These ‘parts’ referred to by Aristotle are organs in the broader sense of tools, rather than perceptive organs.
On the Soul 414a:32—414b:1, translated by J. A. Smith. In The Complete Works of Aristotle.
Imagine, as a rough illustration of the relationship holding among the three kinds of soul, the relationship holding among nesting dolls in a set. Within the ‘human doll’ is the ‘animal doll.’ Within the ‘animal doll’ is the ‘vegetable doll.’
On the Soul 415a:6-12, translated by J. A. Smith. In The Complete Works of Aristotle.
This is not to imply that all advanced civilizations have been based upon widespread institutional deception.
On the Soul 427b:7-9, translated by J. A. Smith. In The Complete Works of Aristotle.
Some in more ways than others.
On the Soul 429a:20-24, translated by J. A. Smith. In The Complete Works of Aristotle.
Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision: Germany and World Historical Evolution (Honolulu, Hawaii: University Press of the Pacific, 2002; reprinted from the 1933 edition), 109.
https://www.britannica.com/art/hero-literary-and-cultural-figure
Carl von Clausewitz, On War, edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1976), 87.
“One cannot fail to see at the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory; this hidden core needs to erupt from time to time… It is the noble races that have left behind them the concept ‘barbarian’ wherever they have gone; even their highest culture betrays a consciousness of it and even a pride in it.” Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Section 11, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 2000).